Tiffany
Justin plopped down on his family room floor with a stack of printer paper and a box of crayons, and motioned for me to join him on the ground. Reluctant, I slinked off the couch, my legs burning from all of that awful running, and landed on the rug with a thump.
“Are we having a coloring contest?”
He smiled as he opened the crayons. We used to have coloring contests when we were kids, and our parents would be the judges. We always tied, even though my pictures were always way more awesome than his.
“Nope.” He looked around the room. “Are they here?”
The girl and baby were standing right next to me and the boy was jumping on the couch. “Yeah.” I reached up and took the baby from the girl and set it in my lap. I handed it a piece of paper and let it smash, and lick, and tear at it.
Justin sat up straighter and dropped his brows, staring at what would have looked like a floating paper in my lap, then looked about to make sure that Kori wasn’t around to see the strangeness. The muted dance music let us know that she was still inside her room with the door shut. Hannah was at work, so we were safe.
Justin became all business. He set a piece of paper between us and put a crayon on top of it. “Do you think you can help me convince them to draw us pictures?”
I motioned for the girl to take the crayon and she did, smiling. I noticed Justin’s chest rose and fell faster as he watched her draw. Except he couldn’t be watching her. He was watching a crayon float in the air and draw on a paper all by itself. It was really interesting to me that he was scared of something that I wasn’t. That never happened.
“Ask her if she can tell us what she needs,” he said fixated on the paper.
I looked over at the girl but she just nodded and changed to a pink crayon. Her loose dark curls fell around her face as she concentrated on drawing.
“I think she heard you.”
The girl drew a circle . . . with a face . . . and sticks coming out the bottom.
“Is that you?” I asked.
She nodded and drew four more circles.
“Are there more of you guys?”
She nodded and kept adding details to her picture.
“Brothers and sisters?”
She shook her head.
Justin scooted in close to me so that he could see the picture better. It was a bit squishy, but with Justin it didn’t bother me. We had been invading each other’s bubbles way before either of us knew what personal space was.
Maybe that was it. “Friends?”
She stopped drawing and seemed to be thinking about how to answer.
I pointed to the first three circles. “These are you guys.” She nodded. Then I pointed to the last two. “Are these your friends?”
She shook her head and went back to drawing hair on the circles.
“Are they bad people?”
She looked at me like I was crazy and shook her head. The boy stopped jumping and came over to watch her draw.
She started to draw a clear R.
“She can spell?” There was excitement in Justin’s voice. “How old did you say she looked? Have her write what it is she wants.”
I looked at her. She really had to concentrate to write the R and looked too young to write, but maybe I was wrong. Her mouth was screwed up tight as she drew a letter O. Either an O or circle person without a face yet. “We want to know how to help you.”
Without looking up from her work she smiled and went back to writing. This time a lower case b.
Justin was studying the picture. “Rob? Is one of them named Rob? Where they robbed? Ask her if they were robbed.”
Without me saying anything, the girl shook her head and drew a Y.
“Roby?” Justin said.
The boy grabbed a crayon and was about to start writing on the floor when I caught him and pulled the crayon out of his hand. He started wailing and I gave it back to him with a piece of paper. He seemed to understand what that meant and started scribbling. We both leaned in to see what the boy was drawing but it seemed to be mayhem more than anything worth watching.
Justin leaned back, losing interest in the boy’s scribbles. He looked like he had something to say but was searching for the right words. I could almost see the puzzle being solved behind his coffee-colored eyes. He figured something out. I found myself desperate to hear what he was going to say. “So that new moon on Tuesday. You still have the sage, right?”
The sage and the new moon. That’s what he wanted to talk about? I lost interest and started to watch the girl who was drawing circle people on a new sheet of paper. “Yeah. Why? Does the devil pay a visit on the new moon?”
“No, nothing like that . . .”
“Then I’m good.” I became engrossed in the girls drawing. She had drawn two circle people and then violently scribbled them out.
“Are they dead?” I asked pointing to the scribbled people.
The girl got excited and nodded.
“Party in the USA” got loud, and a set of thick boots came clomping down the stairs. I ripped the crayon out of the girl’s hand and Justin did the same with the boy’s.
“Wazzup?” Kori said coming around the corner with an empty carton of ice cream and a spoon. My mother would never let me eat out of a container like that. We had special waffle-shaped bowls for ice cream. And walking around with food was strictly forbidden.
“What’s all this?” Kori leapt over the couch to get a better look at our drawings, her braids bouncing around her face.
I thought some of the ice cream dripped in the process and I was certain her shoes touched the couch, but it was her house, so whatever.
“Did you guys draw those?” She picked up the boy’s scribbled picture and laughed. “Dang, your junior high art classes are paying off.” She hit the last word hard.
“Shut your cake hole.” Justin reached up to grab the paper out of her hand. She evaded him, but as she did the spoon fell out onto the rug. Kori bent over, picked it up, and wiped it on her jean shorts before grabbing the girl’s paper with the circles.
The girl didn’t like that at all and snatched it right out of Kori’s hand.
Kori looked at me, slack jawed then turned to Justin for an explanation.
Justin started rubbing his fingers across his lips then gave a quick shoulder shrug.
Kori got excited. “Here? Now?” She sat on the couch and set her carton on the ground. “Can I stay and watch?”
“Actually,” Justin said standing up and gathering the papers. “We were just about go over to Tiffany’s house.”
That was news to me but I got to my feet and followed him to the door.
“It’s not them is it?” Kori said as we walked out of the house.
“No,” Justin said before shutting the door. “It’s not them.”
Did Kori know about ghosts too? I wanted to ask Justin but he asked something of me instead. “Are they her parents?”
I looked over at the girl and she nodded, smiling at Justin for figuring it out.
I got a shiver. “Yeah. Good guess.”
Without looking up from the paper Justin asked, “Can we use your computer? I have an idea.”
Hannah, Justin’s oldest sister, pulled into the driveway behind us and shouted as she got out of the van. “Justin, where are you going? You’re in charge of dinner tonight.”
Justin stopped in the empty street and turned around. “I’m making spaghetti. I just need to help Tiffany with something really fast. Then I’ll start.”
“Spaghetti? Again?” Hannah looked tired as she hefted her purse on her shoulder and undid the top button of her work shirt. “Whatever. Evening, Tiffany.”
I waved. “Hey, Hannah.”
The house was empty. My mother was teaching yoga and my dad was at poker. We made our way to my room and my computer.
Justin turned it on and jumped on the internet. “They probably lived around here so if we can get an idea of when the parents died, I might be able to find their obituaries. What are the kids wearing?”
I sat down on end of the bed. “The girl is wearing a dress and so is the baby. But the baby’s dress is more like a nightgown.” It felt like my words were inadequate to describe what I was seeing. Super old kept coming to mind, but that didn’t seem useful. “The boy’s dressed like a sailor. Wait, not like a sailor. He’s got the long socks and shorts like those old sailor costumes but he has a button up shirt. Not like a normal button shirt—”
“Something like this?” Justin said pointing to a black and white picture of a group of kids posing in front of a school.
I couldn’t see well from where I was sitting on the bed. I joined him on the office chair, both of us completely squished, and leaned in to study the picture. “Kinda but that looks more Sandlot and these guys look more Little House on the Prairie.”
He scrolled and found a picture of a family standing in front of a wagon. “Like this?”
The little girl leaned in and traced the wagon on the screen with her finger.
“She seems to like the wagon,” I told him. “We might have figured it out.”
“Let me try something else.” Justin googled Model T. “Ask her if she knows this.”
“Have you seen one of these before?”
The girl pointed to the car over and over again with a huge smile on her face.
“Yeah, she knows it.”
“Good, this helps.” He pulled up another image. “This is a 1930s Cadillac. Does she know this car?”
The girl looked closely at it and then shook her head. Justin found three more cars but the girl didn’t know any of them.
“Early 1900s. That’s a good starting point.” Justin said. He looked at my clock. “It’s pretty late. I better go start . . .”
Before he could even finish his sentence, let alone get up out of the chair, my dad walked into my bedroom. Poker was over. Until my dad came in, I had no idea how close I was sitting to Justin. We might as well have been conjoined twins. Dad didn’t say a word but scowled and pointed down the hall. Justin understood and walked out.